Download or read book The Visualization of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe written by J. H. Chajes and published by Brepols Publishers. This book was released on 2020 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All of us are exposed to graphic means of communication on a daily basis. Our life seems flooded with lists, tables, charts, diagrams, models, maps, and forms of notation. Although we now take such devices for granted, their role in the codification and transmission of knowledge evolved within historical contexts where they performed particular tasks. The medieval and early modern periods stand as a formative era during which visual structures, both mental and material, increasingly shaped and systematized knowledge. Yet these periods have been sidelined as theorists interested in the epistemic potential of visual strategies have privileged the modern natural sciences. This volume expands the field of research by focusing on the relationship between the arts of memory and modes of graphic mediation through the sixteenth century. Chapters encompass Christian (Greek as well as Latin) production, Jewish (Hebrew) traditions, and the transfer of Arabic learning. The linked essays anthologized here consider the generative power of schemata, cartographic representation, and even the layout of text: more than merely compiling information, visual arrangements formalize abstract concepts, provide grids through which to process data, set in motion analytic operations that give rise to new ideas, and create interpretive frameworks for understanding the world.
Download or read book Globalism in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age written by Albrecht Classen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-09-05 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although it is fashionable among modernists to claim that globalism emerged only since ca. 1800, the opposite can well be documented through careful comparative and transdisciplinary studies, as this volume demonstrates, offering a wide range of innovative perspectives on often neglected literary, philosophical, historical, or medical documents. Texts, images, ideas, knowledge, and objects migrated throughout the world already in the pre-modern world, even if the quantitative level compared to the modern world might have been different. In fact, by means of translations and trade, for instance, global connections were established and maintained over the centuries. Archetypal motifs developed in many literatures indicate how much pre-modern people actually shared. But we also discover hard-core facts of global economic exchange, import of exotic medicine, and, on another level, intensive intellectual debates on religious issues. Literary evidence serves best to expose the extent to which contacts with people in foreign countries were imaginable, often desirable, and at times feared, of course. The pre-modern world was much more on the move and reached out to distant lands out of curiosity, economic interests, and political and military concerns. Diplomats crisscrossed the continents, and artists, poets, and craftsmen traveled widely. We can identify, for instance, both the Vikings and the Arabs as global players long before the rise of modern globalism, so this volume promises to rewrite many of our traditional notions about pre-modern worldviews, economic conditions, and the literary sharing on a global level, as perhaps best expressed by the genre of the fable.
Download or read book Maps and Travel in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period written by Ingrid Baumgärtner and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-03-04 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume discusses the world as it was known in the Medieval and Early Modern periods, focusing on projects concerned with mapping as a conceptual and artistic practice, with visual representations of space, and with destinations of real and fictive travel. Maps were often taken as straightforward, objective configurations. However, they expose deeply subjective frameworks with social, political, and economic significance. Travel narratives, whether illustrated or not, can address similar frameworks. Whereas travelled space is often adventurous, and speaking of hardship, strange encounters and danger, city portraits tell a tale of civilized life and civic pride. The book seeks to address the multiple ways in which maps and travel literature conceive of the world, communicate a 'Weltbild', depict space, and/or define knowledge. The volume challenges academic boundaries in the study of cartography by exploring the links between mapmaking and artistic practices. The contributions discuss individual mapmakers, authors of travelogues, mapmaking as an artistic practice, the relationship between travel literature and mapmaking, illustration in travel literature, and imagination in depictions of newly explored worlds.
Download or read book Latin Literatures of Medieval and Early Modern Times in Europe and Beyond written by Francesco Stella and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2024-07-15 with total page 726 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The textual heritage of Medieval Latin is one of the greatest reservoirs of human culture. Repertories list more than 16,000 authors from about 20 modern countries. Until now, there has been no introduction to this world in its full geographical extension. Forty contributors fill this gap by adopting a new perspective, making available to specialists (but also to the interested public) new materials and insights. The project presents an overview of Medieval (and post-medieval) Latin Literatures as a global phenomenon including both Europe and extra-European regions. It serves as an introduction to medieval Latin's complex and multi-layered culture, whose attraction has been underestimated until now. Traditional overviews mostly flatten specificities, yet in many countries medieval Latin literature is still studied with reference to the local history. Thus the first section presents 20 regional surveys, including chapters on authors and works of Latin Literature in Eastern, Central and Northern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas. Subsequent chapters highlight shared patterns of circulation, adaptation, and exchange, and underline the appeal of medieval intermediality, as evidenced in manuscripts, maps, scientific treatises and iconotexts, and its performativity in narrations, theatre, sermons and music. The last section deals with literary “interfaces,” that is motifs or characters that exemplify the double-sided or the long-term transformations of medieval Latin mythologemes in vernacular culture, both early modern and modern, such as the legends about King Arthur, Faust, and Hamlet.
Download or read book Nature in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Times written by Albrecht Classen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-07-01 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of pre-modern anthropology requires the close examination of the relationship between nature and human society, which has been both precarious and threatening as well as productive, soothing, inviting, and pleasurable. Much depends on the specific circumstances, as the works by philosophers, theologians, poets, artists, and medical practitioners have regularly demonstrated. It would not be good enough, as previous scholarship has commonly done, to examine simply what the various writers or artists had to say about nature. While modern scientists consider just the hard-core data of the objective world, cultural historians and literary scholars endeavor to comprehend the deeper meaning of the concept of nature presented by countless writers and artists. Only when we have a good grasp of the interactions between people and their natural environment, are we in a position to identify and interpret mental structures, social and economic relationships, medical and scientific concepts of human health, and the messages about all existence as depicted in major art works. In light of the current conditions threatening to bring upon us a global crisis, it matters centrally to take into consideration pre-modern discourses on nature and its enormous powers to understand the topoi and tropes determining the concepts through which we perceive nature. Nature thus proves to be a force far beyond all human comprehensibility, being both material and spiritual depending on our critical approaches.
Download or read book The Art of Anatomy in Medieval Europe written by Taylor McCall and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2023-08-15 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new history of the medieval illustrations that birthed modern anatomy. This book is the first history of medieval European anatomical images. Richly illustrated, The Art of Anatomy in Medieval Europe explores the many ways in which medieval surgeons, doctors, monks, and artists understood and depicted human anatomy. Taylor McCall refutes the common misconception that Renaissance artists and anatomists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Andreas Vesalius were the fathers of anatomy who performed the first human dissections. On the contrary, she argues that these Renaissance figures drew upon centuries of visual and written tradition in their works.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Cartographic Humanities written by Tania Rossetto and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-06-03 with total page 539 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Cartographic Humanities offers a vibrant exploration of the intersection and convergence between map studies and the humanities through the multifaceted traditions and inclinations from different disciplinary, geographical and cultural contexts. With 42 chapters from leading scholars, this book provides an intellectual infrastructure to navigate core theories, critical concepts, phenomenologies and ecologies of mapping, while also providing insights into exciting new directions for future scholarship. It is organised into seven parts: Part 1 moves from the depths of the humans–maps relation to the posthuman dimension, from antiquity to the future of humanity, presenting a multidisciplinary perspective that bridges chronological distances, introspective instances and social engagements. Part 2 draws on ancient, archaeological, historical and literary sources, to consider the materialities and textures embedded in such texts. Fictional and non-fictional cartographies are explored, including layers of time, mobile historical phenomena, unmappable terrain features, and even animal perspectives. Part 3 examines maps and mappings from a medial perspective, offering theoretical insight into cartographic mediality as well as studies of its intermedial relations with other media. Part 4 explores how a cultural cartographic perspective can be productive in researching the digital as a human experience, considering the development of a cultural attentiveness to a wide range of map-related phenomena that interweave human subjectivities and nonhuman entities in a digital ecology. Part 5 addresses a range of issues and urgencies that have been, and still are, at the centre of critical cartographic thinking, from politics, inequalities and discrimination. Part 6 considers the growing amount of literature and creative experimentation that involve mapping in practices of eliciting individual life histories, collective identities and self-accounts. Part 7 examines the variety of ways in which we can think of maps in the public realm. This innovative and expansive Handbook will appeal to those in the fields of geography, art, philosophy, media and visual studies, anthropology, history, digital humanities and cultural studies as well as industry professionals.
Download or read book Lines of Thought written by Ayelet Even-Ezra and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-04-26 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We think with objects—we conduct our lives surrounded by external devices that help us recall information, calculate, plan, design, make decisions, articulate ideas, and organize the chaos that fills our heads. Medieval scholars learned to think with their pages in a peculiar way: drawing hundreds of tree diagrams. Lines of Thought is the first book to investigate this prevalent but poorly studied notational habit, analyzing the practice from linguistic and cognitive perspectives and studying its application across theology, philosophy, law, and medicine. These diagrams not only allow a glimpse into the thinking practices of the past but also constitute a chapter in the history of how people learned to rely on external devices—from stone to parchment to slide rules to smartphones—for recording, storing, and processing information. Beautifully illustrated throughout with previously unstudied and unedited diagrams, Lines of Thought is a historical overview of an important cognitive habit, providing a new window into the world of medieval scholars and their patterns of thinking.
Download or read book Between Manuscript and Print written by Sylvia Brockstieger and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-07-24 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cross-cultural, comparative view on the transition from a predominant 'culture of handwriting' to a predominant 'culture of print' in the late medieval and early modern periods is provided here, combining research on Christian and Jewish European book culture with findings on East Asian manuscript and print culture. This approach highlights interactions and interdependencies instead of retracing a linear process from the manuscript book to its printed successor. While each chapter is written as a disciplinary study focused on one specific case from the respective field, the volume as a whole allows for transcultural perspectives. It thereby not only focusses on change, but also on simultaneities of manuscript and printing practices as well as on shifts in the perception of media, writing surfaces, and materials: Which values did writers, printers, and readers attribute to the handwritten and printed materials? For which types of texts was handwriting preferred or perceived as suitable? How and under which circumstances could handwritten and printed texts coexist, even within the same document, and which epistemic dynamics emerged from such textual assemblages?
Download or read book Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms written by Jessica Brantley and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2022-11-22 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms, Jessica Brantley offers an innovative introduction to manuscript culture that uses the artifacts themselves to open some of the most vital theoretical questions in medieval literary studies. With nearly 200 illustrations, many of them in color, the book offers both a broad survey of the physical forms and cultural histories of manuscripts and a dozen case studies of particularly significant literary witnesses, including the Beowulf manuscript, the St. Albans Psalter, the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, and The Book of Margery Kempe. Practical discussions of parchment, scripts, decoration, illustration, and bindings mix with consideration of such conceptual categories as ownership, authorship, language, miscellaneity, geography, writing, editing, mediation, illustration, and performance—as well as of the status of the literary itself. Each case study includes an essay orienting the reader to particularly productive categories of analysis and a selected bibliography for further research. Because a high-quality digital surrogate exists for each of the selected manuscripts, fully and freely available online, readers can gain access to the artifacts in their entirety, enabling further individual exploration and facilitating the book’s classroom use. Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms aims to inspire a broad group of readers with some of the excitement of literary manuscript studies in the twenty-first century. The interpretative frameworks surrounding each object will assist everyone in thinking through the implications of manuscript culture more generally, not only for the deeper study of the literature of the Middle Ages, but also for a better understanding of book cultures of any era, including our own.
Download or read book Digital Scholarly Editions Beyond Text written by Tessa Gengnagel and published by arthistoricum.net. This book was released on 2024-02-07 with total page 570 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholarly editions contextualize our cultural heritage. Traditionally, methodologies from the field of scholarly editing are applied to works of literature, e.g. in order to trace their genesis or present their varied history of transmission. What do we make of the variance in other types of cultural heritage? How can we describe, record, and reproduce it systematically? From medieval to modern times, from image to audiovisual media, the book traces discourses across different disciplines in order to develop a conceptual model for scholarly editions on a broader scale. By doing so, it also delves into the theory and philosophy of the (digital) humanities as such.
Download or read book Image Imagination and Cognition written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-07-03 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How were the relations among image, imagination and cognition characterized in the period 1500 – 1800? The authors of this volume argue that in those three centuries, a thoroughgoing transformation affected the following issues: (i) what it meant to understand phenomena in the natural world (cognition); (ii) how such phenomena were visualized or pictured (images, including novel types of diagrams, structural models, maps, etc.); and (iii) what role was attributed to the faculty of the imagination (psychology, creativity). The essays collected in this volume examine the new conceptions that were advanced and the novel ways of comprehending and expressing the relations among image, imagination, and cognition. They also shed light, from a variety of perspectives, on the elusive nexus of conceptions and practices.
Download or read book Instrumentality written by J. Allan Mitchell and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2024-10-22 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From medieval to modern, exploring instrumental attitudes toward physical gadgets, diagrams, concepts, methods, and disciplines Opening up the instrumental condition of the human for critical reflection and renewal, Instrumentality illuminates key moments in the intellectual history of the European Middle Ages. J. Allan Mitchell reveals how, in the predigital past, we can recognize many of the operative technics, analytics, and metaphorics that continue to shape human sense and cognition today. Exploring the diverse modalities of medieval instruments, Mitchell’s case studies encompass techniques as seemingly distinct as time-keeping mechanisms, mathematical diagrams, logical syllogisms, and the literary devices of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower. A cultural and intellectual history, Mitchell’s work leads readers from three-dimensional objects (physical mechanisms) to two-dimensional inscriptions (maps and diagrams) and onward to overarching disciplinary norms in the early liberal and mechanical arts. Prying loose the subtle, adaptable, and generative concept of technical objects from limiting contemporary frameworks, he shows how these instruments are indispensable to the past—and the future—of the arts and culture at large.
Download or read book Art Architecture and the Moving Viewer c 300 1500 CE written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-04-19 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays address how narratives unfolded in time and space when a body or object moved through premodern architectural or natural environments. Such narratives encompass interpretations of topography, change in built environments over time, and spaces for public assembly.
Download or read book Reimagining Jerusalem s Architectural Identities in the Later Middle Ages written by Cathleen A. Fleck and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-10-10 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores several fascinating medieval Christian and Islamic artworks that represent and reimagine Jerusalem’s architecture as religious and political instruments to express power, entice visitors, console the devoted, offer spiritual guidance, and convey the city’s mythical history.
Download or read book Confronting Kabbalah Studies in the Christian Hebraist Library of Johann Albrecht Widmanstetter written by Maximilian de Molière and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-01-08 with total page 679 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Johann Albrecht Widmanstetter (1506–1557), humanist and privy councillor to popes and kings, has remained an enigmatic figure among Christian Hebraists whose views were little understood. This study leverages Widmanstetter's remarkable collection consisting of hundreds of Jewish manuscripts and printed books, most of which survive to this day. Explore in the first half the story of Jewish book production and collecting in sixteenth-century Europe through Widmanstetter's book acquisitions, librarianship, and correspondence. Delve into his unique perspective on Jewish literature and Kabbalah as the latter half of the study contextualizes the marginal notes in his library with his published works.
Download or read book Canones The Art of Harmony written by Alessandro Bausi and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-11-23 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The so-called ‘Canon Tables’ of the Christian Gospels are an absolutely remarkable feature of the early, late antique, and medieval Christian manuscript cultures of East and West, the invention of which is commonly attributed to Eusebius and dated to first decades of the fourth century AD. Intended to host a technical device for structuring, organizing, and navigating the Four Gospels united in a single codex – and, in doing so, building upon and bringing to completion previous endeavours – the Canon Tables were apparently from the beginning a highly complex combination of text, numbers and images, that became an integral and fixed part of all the manuscripts containing the Four Gospels as Sacred Scripture of the Christians and can be seen as exemplary for the formation, development and spreading of a specific Christian manuscript culture across East and West AD 300 and 800. In the footsteps of Carl Nordenfalk’s masterly publication of 1938 and few following contributions, this book offers an updated overview on the topic of ‘Canon Tables’ in a comparative perspective and with a precise look at their context of origin, their visual appearance, their meaning, function and their usage in different times, domains, and cultures.
